IMG has posted a review of X-Plane 8, the latest version of the venerable flight simulator by author Austin Meyer. Here's a clip from the review by IMG's own Tim Morgan:

The first and foremost feature of version 8 is its new scenery engine. X-Plane's global scenery has always been based on the GIS land-use database. This database contains information on the general types of land use (green vegetation, sparse city, arid desert) around the world. X-Plane draws textures for all these kinds of land, and viola: we have a fairly accurate representation of the world